I made this homage to Varujan Boghosian while I was at the
@vermontstudiocenter in March.
Varujun Boghosian's PTown Studio, 2026
Indigo dye, lime paint, acrylic, pine bough, on rice paper and wood panel
12" x 22" x 2"
Varujan was one of my role models at Dartmouth. An artist who created shrinelike reverent beauty in his work, but always with levity and wry humor to the work. He was a respected professor too, who taught at UF, Pratt, Brown, Yale, Cooper Hewitt and Dartmouth before becoming an emeritus professor at Dartmouth upon retirement. His studio space in our sculpture studio was filled with the antiques and trash find treasures he used to make his poetic compositions.
He'd peek at our work and give ad hoc praise and joyful add-on ideas as we young fledgings tried to find our creative voices. He had found his decades before in the 60s showing alongside his peers: Joseph Cornell, Alex Katz, Joan Mitchell, Isamu Noguchi, Cy Twombly, and Robert Rauschenberg.
His friend Stanley Kunitz wrote this about him:
Chariot
for Varujan Boghosian
In this image of my friend’s studio,
where curiosity runs the shop, and you
can almost smell the nostalgic dust
settling on the junk of lost mythologies,
the artist himself stays out of view.
Yet anyone could guess
this is the magician’s place
from his collection of conical hats
and the sprawled puppets on a shelf,
the broken as well as the whole,
that have grown to resemble him,
or the other way round.
Butterflies, gameboards, and bells,
strewn jacks and alphabet blocks,
spindles, old music scores—
the litter spreads from wall to wall.
If you could dig to the bottom,
you might expect to find
a child’s plush heart,
a shing agate eye.
Here everything waits to be renewed.
That horse-age wagon wheel
proped in the corner
against an empty picture-frame,
Even in its state of disrepair,
minus three spokes,
looks poised for flight.
Tomorrow, maybe, at the crack of a whip
a flock of glittering birds will perch
on its rim, a burnished stranger
wearing an enigmatic mask
will mount its hub
and the great battered wheel
will start to spin.
#assemblage #art
